When kids are reading, they're not breaking bones

VANCOUVER — The emails started arriving in 2005, sometime after her walk across the graduation stage at Sir Winston Churchill secondary in Vancouver and long before another ex-student started receiving similar emails.

That would come later.

Graduations are about goodbyes. But one teacher, Sean Vincent McLaughlin, apparently wasn’t able to say his that day in 2005. So he started writing his ex-student emails. Some praised her beauty, while others described his longing. At least one described his lust.

“I woke up this morning thinking about you,” reads one email dated Jan. 1, 2007. “Does that make you want to spank me for being a bad boy or are you happy?” Another, dated June 24, 2009, reads: “I ache for your slender and delicious body and dream about you seeing me again. Love Sean.”

Segments of the emails are contained in a six-page consent resolution agreement between McLaughlin, first certified in 1988, and the B.C. Commissioner for Teacher Regulation released this week.

As part of the deal, McLaughlin agreed to the cancellation of his teaching certification and to never apply for another one.

As a whole, the documents paint a disturbing portrait of McLaughlin’s behaviour over a five-year period beginning in 2005. In total, he sent 45 emails to the first student, labelled Student A in the documents, from 2005 until 2009. He also called her at least once.

“In the summer of 2007, former Student A received a telephone call from McLaughlin shortly after midnight,” read the documents. “McLaughlin was heard moaning, and saying words like, ‘Oh (former Student A), I miss you so much’ in a deep and passionate tone.”

TEACHER’S EMAILS

Excerpts of some of the emails that Sean Vincent McLaughlin wrote to a former student:

• “Thank you so much for the wonderful card and incredible pictures … You are so stunning and beautiful.”

• “I woke up this morning thinking about you. Does that make you want to spank me for being a bad boy or are you happy?”

Eventually, McLaughlin began a similar relationship with another ex-student — Student B in the documents — that began upon her graduation in 2007. Like Student A, McLaughlin sent this student several “inappropriate” emails, the documents say.

“I love hearing from you (former Student B),” reads an email dated Nov. 23, 2007. “You have always been overwhelmingly lovely. Do you like it when I tell you that (former Student B)? You know I feel that way about you, don’t you? Love always, Sean.”

Student B also described two incidents from the 2006-07 school year involving McLaughlin, where she was made to feel “physically uncomfortable.” In one incident, he “put his hands in her lap and then hugged her.”

McLaughlin, the documents reveal, also wrote inappropriate messages in Student A’s yearbooks while she was still a student at the school. Three examples are provided in the documents from the 2002-03, 2003-04 and 2004-05 yearbooks.

“Your beauty is so overwhelming, your intelligence is admirable, but most importantly your heart is a precious gift every man would hope for …” he wrote in her 2004-05 yearbook. “If, many years from now, you suddenly remember your old teacher, it is because I am sitting by a little stream under a giant tree dreaming of you … My heart weeps that our time together will not be so frequent.”

In October 2010, the school district advised the B.C. College of Teachers that McLaughlin had been sent a letter of discipline for “inappropriate off-duty email exchanges” with Student A.

The college launched a formal probe into the matter in November 2010. And it wasn’t until last January that Student B approached the teacher-regulation branch to file her own complaint. The two cases were combined this October and the consent agreement was entered.

In the documents, McLaughlin blames some of his behaviour on alcohol and depression resulting from “a permanent chronic pain condition.” However, he has no recollection of the two incidents described by Student B that made her “physically uncomfortable.”

“McLaughlin acknowledges that his emails were inappropriate because, although the students had graduated, his contact with them flowed from the teaching relationship and they were still viewing him primarily as a former teacher,” the documents read.

Between January 2009 and November 2013, there were 11 teachers whose certificates were cancelled as the result of a disciplinary decision, according to a spokesman with the regulation branch.

It remains unclear how many of those cancellations involved questionable electronic communication by a teacher, but the ministry acknowledged that widespread use of social media by teachers now requires investigators to “broaden their investigative procedures to ensure all facts and evidence pertinent to a case is collected.”